- Researchers have deployed a brand new tracker that helps them monitor prairie dogs and monitor their actions underground.
- The tracker makes use of sensors, together with accelerometers and magnetometers, and combines them with GPS know-how to allow researchers to retrace the trajectories of the animals.
- Prairie dogs dig up complicated burrow techniques and spend most of their time underground, making their actions elusive.
- During preliminary trials, researchers have been in a position to make use of the trackers to reconstruct the trajectories of prairie dogs whereas they have been underground.
To say monitoring prairie dogs is troublesome could be an understatement.
The animals spend most of their time in burrows. Since standard GPS collars don’t operate underground, the actions and interactions of prairie dogs (Cynomys spp.) have remained notoriously elusive to the researchers who research them.
What do they do? How do they transfer inside their complicated burrow techniques which have designated areas for storing meals and sleeping? While these questions have remained unanswered for a very long time, researchers at the moment are testing a brand new tracker which may make clear how prairie dogs may be spending their time.
The Daily Diary trackers, initially developed to watch penguins, use accelerometers and magnetometers, and mix that knowledge with GPS know-how to watch prairie canine actions underground. While accelerometers measure if and how briskly the animals are shifting, the magnetometers allow researchers to find out the path of their actions. Researchers calibrate this knowledge with GPS info obtained when the animals come out of their burrows, which then offers them an estimation for a way the animals are shifting.
“Using all that data, we are able to get a bearing on what the animal is doing, and reconstruct their trajectories at a very fine scale,” Hila Shamon, analysis ecologist on the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute who’s a part of the analysis, instructed Mongabay in a video interview. “For example, the animal started in burrow A and came out of burrow D. If we know those two endpoints, we’re able to reconstruct the trajectory between those two points to see what the animals did.”
Prairie dogs, from the identical household of animals as squirrels, are thought of a keystone species in grasslands. They create habitats for a lot of different species within the ecosystem. For instance, they feed on grass and maintain them quick, thereby creating appropriate breeding grounds for a number of grassland birds. They’re additionally a key a part of the diets of many species, together with black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes), probably the most threatened mammals in North America.
“They will not exist if prairie dogs don’t exist,” Shamon stated. “We refer to them as the ‘Prairie McNuggets’ because they are a food source for carnivores, prey birds and many other species in this ecosystem.”
However, prairie canine populations are threatened by the sylvatic plague, an infectious bacterial illness. They’re additionally usually exterminated by farmers who think about them crop-destroying pests. “They used to be quite abundant across the Great Plains in North America, but very little of their historic range remains today, with small pockets of what used to be a vast population,” Shamon stated.
It was when Shamon and her colleagues began trying into new methods to trace prairie dogs that they got here throughout a tracker developed by the corporate Wildbytes Technologies. The tracker had already been deployed by researchers at Swansea University within the U.Ok. to watch penguins and research their foraging habits. Shamon and her colleagues then labored to adapt the trackers to review underground animals.
As a part of the preliminary trials, the researchers collared seven prairie dogs in a managed atmosphere in a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service facility in Colorado. Later, they deployed the know-how in Montana, tagging 23 prairie dogs. Using the information collected, the workforce created three-dimensional renderings that delineated the animals’ actions and made estimations on the place they spent probably the most time. “The trials were successful for us because we were able to put the tags out, recapture animals and retrieve all of our collars back, which usually doesn’t happen,” Shamon stated.
However, with every tracker gathering about 440 knowledge factors per second, knowledge evaluation is a large problem. With the preliminary trials concluded, the workforce is now working to course of and analyze the gathered knowledge. Shamon stated they’re additionally working to develop a pipeline that can make the evaluation course of simpler and extra environment friendly.
In the approaching months, the workforce plans to tag greater than 100 prairie dogs. Shamon stated in addition they intend to maintain them tagged for longer, to permit the gathering of extra knowledge.
“If we have more information about their behavior, movements and survival rates, we might be able to improve the management of these species,” she stated. “This technology holds tremendous promise. We’re just going to have to keep pushing it forward and make it more efficient to streamline the entire process.”
Banner picture: Prairie dogs, from the identical household of animals as squirrels, are thought of a keystone species in grasslands. Image courtesy of Brett Kuxhausen, Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
Abhishyant Kidangoor is a employees author at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.
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